I did not see a room full of educators wringing their hands about what the federal government is doing to them. I did not see institutional leaders performing gratitude for scraps of philanthropic attention. I did not see the particular kind of exhausted, defensive posture that Black institutions in America have been pressured to adopt for as long as they have existed — the posture that says: please don't cut us, please don't close us, please remember that we matter.
What I saw instead, inside the gleaming new science center at Johnson C. Smith University, was something that the people currently dismantling federal support for HBCUs clearly did not anticipate when they drew up their plans—a room full of advocates who have decided that the compass points forward, and who are moving accordingly.
The occasion was the Higher Education Leadership Foundation's inaugural "A Futurist Symposium: Mapping the Future for the HBCU" — a two-day convening that brought together HBCU presidents, philanthropic partners, corporate leaders, and scholars on the JCSU campus. H.E.L.F. has spent a decade building the pipeline of HBCU leadership and this symposium was its argument about what comes next.
And the argument was not a modest one.
That matters because the story being told about HBCUs in Washington right now — in budget proposals, in executive orders, in the casual indifference of policymakers who have decided that institutions built for Black Americans are expendable inconveniences — is a lie. And I am tired of watching that lie go unanswered.
Adam Harris, the author of The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal — And How to Set Them Right, documented with precision what most people in power prefer to treat as ancient, settled history. That from the Morrill Acts forward, the American state made deliberate, documented decisions to underfund Black institutions while funneling resources to predominantly white ones. Harris was not writing about attitudes or atmospheres. He was writing about money — who got it, who didn’t, and why. His argument was that the underfunding of HBCUs is not a market failure or a management problem. It is a policy choice, compounded across generations, that has never been fully reckoned with or repaired.
That context matters now more than ever, because the current assault on HBCUs is not an aberration, it is a continuation. When the federal government moves to gut funding streams, dismantle diversity initiatives, and treat the institutions built for Black Americans as though they are luxuries the country can no longer afford, it is not doing something new. It is doing something old, with new justifications.
What is new — what I witnessed in Charlotte — is the response.
Dr. Herman J. Felton Jr., president of Wiley University and one of H.E.L.F.'s founders, did not open the symposium with reassurances. He opened it with a bold reckoning.
“The grace we once received is spent,” he said. “The benefit of the doubt has been withdrawn. And the champions who sang our praises have gone silent or crossed to the other side of the road and passed us by,” he said.
That is not despair. That is clarity. And clarity, for institutions that have too often been asked to perform optimism in exchange for crumbs of support, is itself a form of liberation.
The argument that ran beneath everything said in Charlotte over those two days was that HBCUs cannot afford to wait for the political climate to improve; for federal goodwill to return, or for the country to finally make good on the debts that Harris and others have documented in painstaking detail. Instead, they must build the infrastructure of sustainability themselves, not because the injustice doesn’t demand a governmental response, but because the governmental response is not coming fast enough, and the institutions and the students inside them cannot wait.
That argument is simultaneously a moral one and a strategic one. And it is the right argument for this moment.
Dr. Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of Complete College America, framed a fireside chat between the two titans of HBCU leadership—Drs. Michael L. Lomax and Harry L. Williams—around a deceptively simple question: what must an HBCU president get right before any serious investor — philanthropic or corporate — should be expected to make a significant bet on that institution? The answers that followed were instructive.
The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) has gone from raising $60 million a year when Lomax took the helm to closing the current fiscal year at $297 million. The organization has built a $5 million endowment for each of its 36 member institutions, structured to deliver annual payouts in perpetuity, with a goal of reaching $2 million per school annually. Williams of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) told a parallel story: a $20 million ceiling shattered, a $50 million goal that no one believed in, and a campaign that now stands at $130 million.
These numbers matter not because they suggest that HBCUs have escaped the structural disadvantages Harris catalogued — they have not — but because they demonstrate what focused, uncompromising institutional leadership can produce even under conditions designed to produce failure. The premise that Black institutions cannot be led with excellence, cannot grow, cannot compete, is being demolished in real time. And the leaders doing the demolishing are not waiting for permission.
The most urgent argument made in Charlotte was about what HBCUs risk if they do not adapt. Not adapt in the sense of abandoning their mission, but in recognizing that the 18-to-22-year-old student population is shrinking, but that the adults who need what HBCUs uniquely offer — rigorous education, nurturing community, preparation for a world that was not built for them — are everywhere. Institutions which refuse to meet those students where they are, will find themselves competing for a dwindling audience while the need they were built to serve goes unmet.
Dr. David Rosowsky, a special advisor to the president of Arizona State University, put it plainly: universities that cannot extend their reach across what he calls “the 60-year arc” of a learner’s life, will be left behind. For HBCUs, that is not a futurist provocation. It is a survival question.
There is a question that Dr. Elfred Anthony Pinkard, the former president of Wilberforce University and a co-founder of H.E..F asked at the end of the convening that has haunted me over these past few days.
We gather, he said. We ideate with passion and creativity. We leave inspired. And then we go back to 101 institutions that still exist, as he put it, “at the fringes of American education — although they do incredible work.”
Why?
After 150 years of documented excellence and producing a disproportionate share of this country’s Black doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and elected officials; after surviving every effort to defund and diminish and dismiss them — why do HBCUs still find themselves at the margins?
Harris answered part of that question. The state has never fully provided. The debt is real, and it is documented, and it has never been paid.
But the leaders gathered in Charlotte were grappling with the other part of the answer — the part that is within their control. It is the part that demands not just moral clarity about what is owed, but strategic ferocity about what must be built. Both things are true simultaneously: the injustice is structural and demands a structural response, and the institutions cannot wait for that response to arrive before doing the work.
The compass points forward. It always has. But pointing is not moving. The work — the hard, unglamorous, politically embattled, morally essential work — starts today.
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Dr. Jamal Watson is a higher education consultant, professor and associate dean of Graduate Studies at Trinity Washington University and the author of this bi-weekly column. Watson is the former executive editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (now The EDU Ledger) and is the author of The Student Debt Crisis: America's Moral Urgency (Broadleaf Books, 2025).
